Well, DUH, Arnold!
by MissAnimation
Summary: When Helga leaves the chalk message "Arnold loves Helga" on the wall for all the world to see, she has to deal with the reactions and consequences from her classmates. They're not quite what she was expecting, either.
1. Monologue Gone Wrong

**Yeah, I've been bitten by the _Hey Arnold! _bug. I can't help it. This is a beloved show from my childhood and now that I'm older I can appreciate the depth of it all. You don't really get that from cartoon shows today. So, here's my little AU of the infamous episode "Arnold and Lila." Where instead of switching names, Helga leaves the message as is and deals with the consequences. Yeah, I know this has been done before, but I'm going to try it, too.**

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><p>"What about you, Arnold? Are you holding a torch for Miss Lila, too?" Helga felt her heart tighten at the question. She wanted to know the answer, and yet she didn't. If he didn't like her then she still had a chance! If he <em>did<em>…well she'd do everything to break them up. _She _was the one who loved Arnold. _She _wanted a chance with the boy who had unknowingly stolen her affections.

"I don't know, Stinky," Arnold admitted. "I mean, I like Lila, but I don't _like her_, like her." The boys walked past the alley Helga had been hiding in. Helga's heart soared and her knees became weak as she leaned against the alley wall. A lovesick smile graced her features and she closed her eyes, turning her face upward toward the sun.

_"He doesn't _like her, _like her!"_ she gushed. Her knees gave way and she collapsed into an empty cardboard box. She let herself get carried away into another poetic monologue. "Oh, _Arnold! _So patient and thoughtful! Spurning the golden girl and saving his affections for one less likely yet perhaps ultimately more deserving! One who may not be the prettiest or the wittiest but whose primitive beauty, grace, and charms lies _tragically _unobserved and unawakened! Someone…like…me! Helga G. Pataki!" Helga walked further down the alley while she said this and when she looked up, she spotted a plant that reminded her of her love's wild golden hair and she was hit with further inspiration.

"Oh, Arnold! Bane of my existence! Blight upon my tortured soul! If only you _knew _my true feelings for you! And if only you felt the same feelings towards me!" If only, if only. Helga let her love and inspiration take her away, not caring about logic or the consequences her actions might hold. "Dare I imagine? If only for one, brief _mad _moment it were true! Call me mad, but I dare! I dare!" Helga pulled out the piece of chalk from her pocket she had been using at recess that day. "With this chalk and no witnesses in sight, I will write the words upon this wall that _bear my soul!_ Expressing all, I hope, I dream, I pine, I pray was true! Forever and a day!"

Helga turned to the wall, determined now. "Arnold…loves…Helga…" she wrote in her prettiest cursive. She finished it off with a heart around the names and an arrow through it. Helga gushed for a moment at her creation. _Perfect! _Absolutely _perfect! _Then she heard familiar giggling. _No! This was not perfect! There were supposed to be no witnesses!_

"I mean, she mixed navy blue and black! What was she thinking!" No! Rhonda Lloyd of all people was headed this way. Helga tried to cover the chalk message. _No! _It wasn't enough! Why did she have to write it so _big? _There was no time to erase it and no hose anywhere! Panicking, Helga ran off to hide, hoping against all hope that Rhonda and her cronies wouldn't look in the alley!

"Hold up, girls!" Rhonda ordered. _Oh, please let her have just seen someone commit a fashion faux pas! _Helga prayed. "'Arnold…loves…Helga?'" Helga's eyes nearly bugged out of her skull and she had to prevent herself from screaming. She had to remind herself to calm down because it's not like _she _had just confessed her feelings. So at least _her _dirty secret wasn't out! Besides, they'd probably think it was just a bad joke!

"Gosh!" Lila gasped.

"Do you think it's true?" Nadine asked Rhonda. _It's not true. Think it's a joke. Think it's a joke. Think it's a joke!_

Rhonda scoffed. "Well, _of course, _it's true! It's written on the wall: 'Arnold loves Helga'." _Crap!_

"Well that's just _ever so sweet_, that Arnold would do something like this," Lila gushed. "But why would he put it on a wall instead of telling Helga herself?"

"The poor boy is just too shy for his own good sometimes," Rhonda explained. "He should have just come to me, though, if he wanted people to know. But don't worry," she assured as she led the girls back down the street. "I'll make a few phone calls and by tomorrow morning, everyone will know, including the object of his desires. I mean, it's _so _obvious that he wanted the right person to stumble upon this and help him out. That person just so happens to be _me._"

Helga emerged from her hiding place as the girls disappeared. She clutched the locked beneath her shirt and looked at the chalk message. "What have I _done?_" she asked herself.

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><p>"Hey, Olga!" Bob called from the other side of her door. "Another one of your little school friends are on the phone! That's the fifth one tonight!"<p>

"Who is it?" Helga asked. So far, Rhonda, Nadine, Lila, and (surprisingly) Stinky had called her. With each call, she had told Bob some excuse: she was tired, she was busy, she was feeling under the weather, anything to avoid talking to people. She needed to calm herself down so she could act all mad and like she didn't know what anybody was talking about tomorrow and the only way she could do that was to build up walls again so she wasn't nearly as vulnerable as she felt now.

"That little Asian girl you always hang around with…Fiona," Bob answered. Helga breathed a sigh of relief.

"Thanks, Bob, I'll take the call up here!" Helga called back. She took a deep breath and picked up the phone. "Phoebe?" she asked.

"Hello, Helga!" Phoebe said brightly on the other end of the line. "I normally don't like to listen to gossip, but I heard something that you might be happy about. It has to do with _ice cream!"_

Helga sighed and laid back on her bed. "If this is about the message on the wall, then you can save it, Pheebs. I already know about it."

"Oh! Did someone else finally manage to reach you? Rhonda did call me right after I got off the phone with Harold and told me you couldn't come to the phone and said Nadine hadn't had any luck, either and I assumed that you just told them excuses so you could have some privacy-"

Helga shot up from her bed. "Wait, wait, wait! Why were you on the phone with Harold?"

"Well he was calling to tell me the same news I wanted to tell you. Although, I had already heard as much from Sheena and Eugene when they called. Harold apparently heard it from Curly." Helga groaned, putting her face in hear free hand.

"My life is _over, _Phoebe! Over! I'm going to have to move to Canada and change my name and whole life story! I'm _ruined!"_

There was a pause on the other end of the line. "Helga…may I stop speaking in code for a minute?" Phoebe asked.

"Yeah, sure, go ahead."

"Well, I just don't understand how your life is _over_," Phoebe continued. "I thought you would be so happy that Arnold has finally fallen in love with you. Now you don't have to hide your feelings for him anymore and you can finally be together."

"There's a major flaw in that little theory of yours, though," Helga pointed out. "Arnold never wrote that message."

"Oh," Phoebe said surprised. "Well if he didn't write that message, then…" Phoebe trailed off and then gasped. "Helga! You _didn't!_"

"Sorry, Phoebe, but I'm gonna have to disagree this time around. I did. _I'm _the one who wrote that message on the wall," Helga admitted.

"Oh, Helga! Why?"

"I don't know, Phoebe, okay? I overheard Arnold saying how he only _liked _Lila and didn't _like her, _like her and then I got carried away and next thing I know, I'm standing in front of a big heart with an arrow through it, with a message inside falsely proclaiming Arnold's love for me and _Rhonda Lloyd _is starting to come my way! So I ran and hid and hoped she wouldn't see, but she did. My life is over."

Phoebe racked her brain for a solution. "Well, I'm sure if you just explained it's just a big misunderstanding…" she began.

"So I'm supposed to go and tell people that _I'm _the one who wrote that on the wall? If I tell people I wrote the message then they'll know that _I'm _in love with Arnold and my life will be over! Then Arnold will reject me! Or worse, Arnold will find out, if he hasn't already, and if I then confess that I was the one who wrote it, he'll think I was trying to play some cruel joke on him and he'll still reject me! If I go to school tomorrow, everyone will be teasing me and Arnold! My secret won't be _out _but with the torment, my life will soon be over. No matter what, Phoebe, I can't win!"

Phoebe sighed. "Well, as bad of a predicament as this is, you still need to go to school tomorrow. It will just look suspicious if you didn't! Just act like you have no idea what people are talking about. Be dumbfounded, be angry, just don't give away more than you want to and with any luck this whole thing should blow over before you know it!"

Helga sighed, twisting the phone cord around her finger. "You really think so, Phoebe?"

"Of course!" Phoebe assured her. "While children our age do tend to get carried away with things like this, they will soon be bored and move on to something else that excites their interests."

Helga smiled weakly. "How long do you think that will take?"

"A few weeks."

Helga groaned again. "My life is _over._"


	2. Bus Ride of Doom and Embarassment

Fate was on Helga's side, for nobody had been able to reach Arnold all night, either. Upon reaching his house, he found out that his grandmother had decided it was the Dark Ages. No lights, no phone, and dinner was cooked outside in the backyard over an open fire. So he had no contact with anybody from school until the next morning when he met up with Gerald on his way to the bus stop.

"Hey, Gerald," Arnold waved as his best friend ran up to him.

"Arnold! Man, I couldn't get a hold of you last night! Nobody picked up!"

Arnold sighed. "Sorry, Gerald. Grandma decided last night that we were going to be medieval. She kept calling me Sir Lancelot."

Gerald shrugged, not surprised by the antics of Arnold's grandmother. "Well, may I just say Arnold, I _knew _you were a bold kid, but I didn't know you were _that _bold! And may I just say: have you _lost _your _mind?_" Arnold was confused.

"I don't know what you're-"

"I mean, I was a little surprised when I heard about the chalk message, but now that it's settled in, I can't _believe _you would do something like that, man!."

"What're you talking about? What chalk message?"

Gerald rolled his eyes. "The message you wrote on the wall, man! I heard about it from almost our whole class last night on the phone." Arnold grabbed his friend's arm, forcing him to stop.

"Gerald, I seriously have _no _idea what you're talking about," Arnold insisted.

Gerald laughed for a moment before realizing that his friend was serious. The smile dropped. "Oh, man. Arnold, let me put it this way: you're in for a rough day at school."

* * *

><p>Helga stomped on the bus, her Walkman head phones covering her ears. She scowled at anybody who glanced at her and took her usual seat. Sure, it was a little hard to feel menacing when she had Dino Spumoni blaring, but she believed she was putting up a good show. Pulling out her geography book, she decided to just engross herself in that instead of paying attention to what was happening around her. Yeah, that should work! Then after some scowls, denial, and the threat of Betsy, everyone would leave her alone.<p>

At least, that was her plan until someone unplugged her Walkman. Helga looked up angrily to see Rhonda holding her Walkman hostage, looking smug.

"You have five seconds to hand that back, Princess!" Helga warned.

Rhonda rolled her eyes, taking the seat in front of Helga. "Oh, _relax, _Helga. I'll give it back. I just wanted to talk to you." Helga noticed Nadine and Lila take the seat across from her, eyes glued to her. _This bites._ "Now, I assume that at least Phoebe got a hold of you last night and _finally _told you the big news!"

Helga crossed her arms and scowled. "Any phone conversations are _my _business, _Rhonda_. Not yours."

"Why, Helga, quite frankly, I'm shocked," Rhonda admitted. "I thought you'd be _happy _that Arnold finally decided he loves you back after all these years!"

Helga scoffed. "I've never heard anything so ridiculous in my entire-wait, _what? _What do you mean 'loves me back?'"

Rhonda reached over the back of the seat and patted Helga on the head. "There, there, Helga. There's no need to hide it anymore. Almost our whole class has known about it forever! Well, except for Lila. But I took the liberty of filling her in with all the details yesterday."

Helga felt all color drain from her face as she whipped her head around toward Lila, who shrugged. "I have to admit, I kind of had a feeling you liked him ever since I moved here but I didn't want to say anything in case I was wrong. But now that I know for _sure, _I just think it's ever so sweet that you like him so much. You two really would make just such a cute couple."

Helga laughed nervously. "Sorry, girls, but I think you all have one or two screws loose. I don't feel that way at all. I hate the little Football Head."

Rhonda nodded. "Okay, Helga. I understand that you don't want Arnold to know until you get the chance to tell him yourself. He doesn't even know that _you _know about his romantic tribute to you, yet. In fact, I couldn't even get a hold of him last night! Don't worry, though! With some careful prodding from the whole class, Arnold will soon have the guts to tell you face to face how he feels. Then you won't have to hide your own feelings anymore! Oh, now I know why you're still denying it! You still want that romantic moment where he finally gathers up the courage to tell you himself! Then you'll be able to tell him you love him back and you'll both live happily ever after! Oh, Helga, I _adore _your plan. It's so romantic!"

Helga's mouth opened and closed in shock. Finally she composed herself enough to scowl and hold out her hand for her Walkman. "Give it back, now!" Helga growled. Rhonda complied with a smug smile on her face. "I'm going to pretend I heard nothing you've said and you're going to pretend you never had those twisted little thoughts enter your brain. And if you repeat this insane conversation to _anyone,_ I will rip your entire wardrobe to shreds, I'll kill all of Nadine's bugs, and I'll use Lila's own braids to wring her little country neck!"

Rhonda rolled her eyes. "Whatever you say, Helga. Come on, girls. Let's leave Helga alone for now."

They wandered off toward the front of the bus just as Phoebe came on. Helga narrowed her eyes. _Phoebe_. There was no other way Rhonda could have known! She couldn't believe it! On top of everything else she had been _betrayed _by her own best friend! She'd kill her!

"Helga!" Phoebe sighed in relief. "How're you holding up this morning?" Helga latched a hand onto Phoebe's arm in a death grip.

"I don't know, Phoebe. Why don't you tell me how _Rhonda Lloyd_ and, according to her, _the entire class_, knows about my obsession with _ice cream!"_ Helga growled menacingly. Phoebe gasped.

"Oh, Helga! I honestly don't know!" Helga glared at her. "Helga! I would never tell anybody your secret and you know it! Now, I don't know how she found out about your obsession with ice cream, but I do know I didn't tell her! I promise!" Helga sighed and let go of Phoebe's arm. The anger melted off of her face.

"Fine, I believe you. I'm sorry," Helga apologized. She sighed. "I guess I just overreacted when Rhonda told me she knew. Oh, crimeny! She said the _whole class knows!_ Except Arnold. Man, that boy is slow."

"Well I don't know who else might've told her. I mean, I'm the only one that knows, right?" Phoebe said.

"Right," Helga nodded. Then her eyes went wide with panic. "Oh, crap! You may not be the only one. There's one person that knows and one person that definitely suspected but I don't know if they believed me or not when I denied it."

Phoebe gasped. "Who?"

Helga growled. "Brainy and Patty. I'll talk to Patty, but I'm going to beat Brain to a pulp once I find him." Helga began to stand up, eyes scanning the bus for Brainy. That was when Arnold stepped on the bus. With a tiny squeak, Helga dropped down into her seat again. "Is this day over with yet?" she grumbled.

Meanwhile, Arnold dropped his change in the slot and started to look for a seat. That was when he noticed the stares he was getting. Gerald pushed him forward. "Just keep moving, Arnold and I'll explain everything to you when I get the chance."

Arnold gave his friend a questioning look but didn't say anything. Rhonda, Nadine, Lila, and Sheena had all been talking rather animatedly in hushed whispers, but Rhonda put a finger on her lips and made a shushing soundas Arnold approached. They all stared at him, trying and failing not to smile. "Um…hi?" Arnold said. All the girls burst out into giggles. Arnold moved on from them, taking his usual seat with Gerald. "Alright, Gerald, what's going on? People are acting weird and what is the chalk message you were talking about?"

Gerald smiled nervously. "Well, I'll show you when we get to school. I haven't seen this message myself, but I know where it's supposed to be."

Arnold was growing increasingly nervous at what could be happening. Gerald wasn't telling him all the details he needed to know and it was annoying.

"Hey, Arnold!" Sid said, looking over the back of his seat at Arnold. Stinky was next to him. "What're you sitting up here for?"

"Yeah!" Stinky agreed. "Why'd you wanna sit up here with us when you could be sittin' with a certain _lady friend _of yours?"

Sid snickered, elbowing Stinky in the side. "Stinky, come on, she's not a lady friend. She's his _girlfriend!"_

Now Arnold was really annoyed. "Sid! I do _not _have a girlfriend!" Gerald pushed them both away.

"Lay off, guys. We're at school anyway." Forgetting temporarily about Arnold, everyone all rushed to get off the bus. Helga nervously watched as Arnold followed Gerald off the bus. Through the windows, she could see them headed, not to the school, but to the alley where she had gotten carried away with her feelings yesterday. Where had Brainy been? He should have showed up behind her like always to bring her to her senses before she did something crazy.

"My life is over!" Helga declared once again to her best friend.

Phoebe patted her comfortingly on the shoulder. "I know, Helga. You've been telling me that since last night."

Gerald peeked into the alley that several classmates had told him about last night on the phone. Yeah, the message was still there, plain as day. Maybe this could be explained away with one of the urban legends floating around in his head.

"Okay, man, here it is, but brace yourself: you may not like it," Gerald warned. Arnold rolled his eyes.

"Gerald, it's just a chalk message that probably isn't true. So why are you so-" Arnold froze when he saw the wall. He blinked. He blinked again. He blinked rapidly for a moment. The chalk message wasn't going away. Finally, he had the reaction Gerald had been expecting. "WHAT?"

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><p><strong>So, yeah. The whole class (with a few exceptions) is pretty much aware that Helga is head over heels in love with Arnold. The majority of the people who are completely or mostly unaware are the boys. Have fun guessing exactly who does and doesn't know.<strong>


End file.
